Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

emerging markets (indeed the rules in many countries oblige fund
managers to seek the highest returns consistent with a level of risk). Such
investment improves the availability of funding for developing economies
that might struggle to finance investment, but also creates governance
challenges to do with the volatility of investment and the management of
interest and profit flows. Equally, immigration is canvassed as one of the
ways in which ageing populations can sustain their work forces, raising
complex inter-country challenges around social provision for migrants
and the burden of investing in human capital – “brain drain” for some;
“brain gain” for others.
Sustainability and competitiveness:
conflicting or complementary?
Critics argue that the supposedly tighter focus of Lisbon II on growth and
jobs has been at the expense of social and environmental aims. There is a
strong presumption that dealing with negative externalities, such as
climate change, or advancing social cohesion will be at odds with
competitiveness, because they imply adding costs, with no immediate
return. According to this narrative, countries which act to abate carbon
emissions or to cut other pollutants, to improve social standards, or to
support economic development in poorer parts of the world will place
themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Certainly, social policy has not been absent from Lisbon II. Many
commentators espouse the view that a job is still the best route to social
inclusion, so that the emphasis on jobs in Lisbon II has social benefits.
There is also supposed to be “feeding-in” from the separate social policy
co-ordination process to the Lisbon strategy and, in turn, “feeding-out”
from the latter to social inclusion objectives. The trouble is that the
channels through which the “feeding” takes place are not that well
developed and, even if they can be shown to work rather better than is
sometimes asserted, there is considerable scepticism among representatives
of social Europe that the social dimension of Lisbon is given sufficient
weight. An example is the joint submission to the 2007 spring European
Council from the European Trade Union Confederation, Social Platform
(representing various social NGOs) and the European Environmental
Bureau which calls for more than “a business-friendly agenda of internal
market and simplified regulation.” 5
Rather than dwelling on possible incompatibilities between competitive
and social aims, perhaps a more useful breakdown would be between what
might be called wealth creating objectives (such as the single market,
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After the crisis: A new socio-economic settlement for the EU